A marker in time as an ode to the new spaces. A collective ode to the new individualism, the extension of teens to the age of 35. Submit this requirement to a lazy ad agency and you get Valentines Day.

Valentine's Day is not a festival. A festival has its roots in a cosmology, it breathes seasons, epics, history. It has a mythical ambience, a religious feeling. Diwali and Rakhi are festivals.

They are even marked by conspicuous consumption but they are not rituals of commodification. As festivals they transcend the merely economic. Valentine's Day is not a festival.

It is an ersatz event like mothers day which was an event invented by the flower trade. Similarly Valentine's Day coalesces around the idea of romance, the solidarity of the greeting card, a sense of the new spaces of individualism.

Have a copy, a few pastries, give a flower and a card to the girl you like. A sense of possibilities made more possible by its economics.

There is nothing religious in it except the commodification. When you celebrate it, don't look for meaning, just the quantum of the billing.

Globalisation needs non-events it can commodify into a cash nexus. Freedom in this domain depends on the silly, the sentimental, the superficial woven into a spectacle .

The drama of conviviality as embodied in new urban spaces needed a logo. And the minor gods of commodification created Valentine's Day. But for anything global to be truly memorable one needs a fundamentalist group to warn against it.

Without the Shiv Sena, Valentine's Day would have disappeared like a bad ad campaign. The Shiv Sena gave it that extra charm, the allure, the sense of the forbidden.

Every advertising agency needs a fundamentalist group to work in loose collaboration with it. That is the true structure of Valentine's Day.